Knut Hamsun: Modernity's Primal Birthing

AbstractKnut Hamsun remains a contested literary figure. Immediately famous beyond his native Norway, his early works excoriate fin‐de‐siècle civilization in the name of the irrational and elementary rhythms of life. Best known for the urgent early novels,Hunger(1890) andPan(1894), and his later epic of northern settlement,Growth of the Soil(1917), his reputation would later be impaired by his increasingly right‐wing outlook. The chapter contextualizes the great variety of Hamsun's oeuvre between romanticism and modernism, and argues that his achievement should be seen in relation to his innovations in literary technique. It suggests how he became one of the voices by which other national literatures learned to articulate cultural authenticity from within individual consciousness. Finally, the chapter shows how Hamsun's continuing importance for world literature rests upon his foregrounding of the primal and irrational in human affairs, often in relation to a “mythic” northern wilderness.